Microsurgery involves tasks that require dexterity levels beyond the normal range of unaided human abilities including motions as small as a few microns and applied forces as delicate as a few grams. Microsurgery operations commonly require up to three hours of intense work that is usually performed after several hours of routine procedure and so it follows reasonably that fatigue and frustration are significant problems for the microsurgeon.
Teleoperation is well known and is used as a way to extend the human reach into hostile or distant environments and has recently started to encompass the extension of human reach through barriers of scale to allow, for example, a person to work on an individual living cell as described by I. W. Hunter et al. in an article entitled, "A Microrobot for Manipulation and Dynamical Testing of Single Living Cells" in Proc. IEEE Microelectro Mechanical Systems, pp 102-106, Salt Lake City, February 1989 or to feel an atom surface, see R. L. Hollis et al., "Towards a Telenano Robotic Manipulation System with Atomic Scale Force Feedback and Motion Resolution", in Proc. 3rd IEEE Microelectro Mechanical Systems, pp 115-119, Nappa Valley, Calif., February 1990 or the other extreme, to feel the payloads of an excavator, see Mostogaa-Starzewski et al., "A Master Slave Manipulator for Excavation and Construction Tasks"; in Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 4:333-337, 1989.
A fine motion technology known as Lorentz magnetic levitation which provides six degrees of freedom (6 DOF) limited range friction less motion with programmable compliance has been applied to a magnetically levitated (maglev) robot wrist as described in Hollis U.S. Pat. No. 4,874,998 issued October 1989, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference and further amplified in a paper by Hollis et al., "Six Degree of Freedom Magnetically Levitated Variable Compliance Fine Motion Wrist", Design, Modelling and Control, IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, 7(3):320-332, June 1991.
A force reflecting system compatible with the above described fine motion technologies described by Salcudean et al. in "A Force Reflecting Teleoperation System with Magnetically Levitated Master and Wrist" in Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Nice, France, May 10-15, 1992.
A number of applications of robotics which were used in the medical field have been described in the art, see for example; James McEwen, "Solo Surgery with Automated Positioning Platforms" in Proceedings of the New Frontiers in Minimally Invasive and Interventional Surgery, New Orleans, La., Oct. 13, 1992; Lavalee et. al in "Image Guided Operating Robot, a Clinical Application in Stereotactic Neuro Surgery" in Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pp 618-624, Nice, France, May 10-15, 1992; Paul et al. in "A Surgical Robot for Total Hip Replacement Surgery" in Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pp 606-611, Nice, France, May 10-15, 1992; and, Kazanzides et al. in "Force Sensing and Control of a Surgical Robot" in Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pp 612-617, Nice, France, May 10-15, 1992.